https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2011/10/27/halloween-and-its-discontents/feed/PJ Media is a leading news site covering culture, politics, faith, homeland security, and more. Our reporters and columnists provide original, in-depth analysis from a variety of perspectives.en-usWed, 10 Jun 2026 04:00:59 -0400<![CDATA[What caused Halloween to become a fall holiday on par with Thanksgiving and Christmas? When did the memo go out? A hundred years ago, when I was a young tike growing up in South Jersey, you wore a thin vacuformed polystyrene spaceman mask that attached to your head with an elastic band, and wore your regular clothes under what seemed like a gray Hefty bag with a NASA logo that tied in the back like a hospital gown, which your parents bought for you at the local Woolworth&#8217;s for $4.99 or so. You scored a few tiny Hershey or Three Musketeers bars, and your parents worried about you getting an apple with a razor blade or a shot of LSD inside. You watched It&#8217;s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown every year on Channel 10, along with John Facenda&#8217;s TV reports about Camden going up in flames annually during the previous night, and worried that the mayhem wasn&#8217;t going to spread to your neighborhood. (This New York Times article on Camden and Mischief Night found at the top of a Google search on the topic was published in 1992, but could have ran verbatim for every year prior for a quarter of a century or so.)]]>Thu, 27 Oct 2011 21:59:15 -0400<![CDATA[Ed Driscoll]]>https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2011/10/27/halloween-and-its-discontents-n137535